Introducing The Tinker!

The Unwritten #28, by Mike Carey, Peter Gross, and Vince Locke

Remember this? It is the one in which Tom Taylor, who may be a fictional character somehow made flesh in the real world (which in this case is of course itself a fictional world within the pages of a comic) struggles against a mysterious cabal intent on controlling the world through manipulating the fiction it consumes. As I keep noting, this title mostly tends towards the quite interesting end of the spectrum, with occasional lurches towards sheer comic genius*.

In this one Taylor and his friends are in New York. He is trying to find out more about Wilson Taylor, his late father, the creator of the Tommy Taylor series of books. Previously he made the shocking discovery that his father was a lot older than he thought and seems to have been knocking around in 1930s New York when the first comic superheroes were emerging. Tom has found his father's diaries of the period, but they are elliptical and cryptic, only half telling us what actually happened and what he did back then. Fortunately he is able to use some of his mysterious abilities to recreate the events to which his father's diary is only alluding.

What we get, then, is an interesting multi-level storyline. Tom and his friends in the here and now are the top layer. The lower one has Wilson Taylor working as an agent of the cabal, charged with assassinating the author of some new superhero comic The Tinker (the cabal fear that these superhero comics could let loose some kind of uncontrollable force in the collective subconsciousness, or something; it doesn't really matter); only the writer turns out to be a woman using a male pseudonym and Wilson predictably becomes romantically involved with her. And the third layer is excerpts from The Tinker itself, an entertaining pastiche of the kind of outlandish and not particularly sophisticated hero comics that emerged in the 1930s.

The art assists in setting the scene, with the contemporary pieces in the "normal" Unwritten style and the 1930s action in a more scratchy style reminiscent of that in Sandman Mystery Theatre**. And then there is the Tinker content, which boasts a facsimile of the somewhat crude art style of the period. All of this is ably accomplished by Peter Gross, with Vince Locke providing finishes for the 1930s material. Credit must also go to Yuko Shimuzu's cover, which is drawn to look like a dog-eared vintage copy of a Tinker-featuring title from back in the day.

So there you go. What I have written hopefully gives you an impression of what happens in this issue and how it is portrayed. But how good is it? In general with this title I wile away my time with the quite interesting episodes waiting for the occasional moments of genius to strike. This is not one of the amazing episodes that The Unwritten sometimes presents us with, but it does seem like the average episodes of this title are getting a lot better – the tri-level story is impressive and I found myself becoming quite engaged with the story of Wilson Taylor's romance with the woman he has been commissioned to kill.

If you have never read The Unwritten and feel motivated to check it out, you would probably be best advised not to rush out and pick up #28. It is in the middle of a story arc (dread phrase) and without back-story might well be semi-incomprehensible. A better bet would be to check out the first of the collections of The Unwritten that DC/Vertigo have published. It is entitled The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity.


image source

*in particular, the episode that was like a mixture of The Prisoner and Winnie the Pooh, the one that gave the back story of the character in a choose-your-own-adventure format, the one that featured Rudyard Kipling as a character, and the one that was like Winnie the Pooh and the Moomins go to Gormenghast. All the stuff about Moby Dick was great too.

**a title you may or may not remember… Vince Locke did some of the art for it.

An inuit panda production

I post links

I have two more reviews on that comics website I mentioned recently. I am still finding the idea of anyone publishing anything I write (even if just on the Internet) so exciting that I am going to post you links to them:

Incognito: Bad Influences #1
(previous Inuit Panda posts about Incognito)

The Unwritten #17
(previous Inuit panda posts about The Unwritten)

Unwritten Panda

An inuit panda production

Flaming Jailbreak

The Unwritten #9, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This odd title about the intrusion of fiction into the real world continues. Tom Taylor (possibly the fictional Tommy Taylor of his father's popular books of children's fantasy) is escaping from jail ahead of a mysterious team of heavily armed nutters intent on killing him. He is perturbed when he starts manifesting abilities of his fictional alter-ego, but more upset when bad things happen to people who have somewhat lost sense of the boundaries between stories and the real world.

The Unwritten remains an entertaining read, but surely they cannot maintain the ambiguity as to what is going on for much longer? And once they give us the big reveal, does the book stop being interesting?

More Comic Action

The Unwritten #6, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This is the odd title about the guy who was the son of a famous writer who might just be a fictional character invented by his father*. The story is a bit involved, and this issue sees Tom Taylor (the guy) arrested by the Swiss authorities on suspicion of having murdered all the other rubbish horror writers who were attending a conference at the Villa Diodati (where Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Milton conceived some poem he wrote, and Taylor's father conceived some fictional fantasy work). For complicated reasons, he finds himself being held on remand in south west France, in a prison called Donostia**. Various odd things happen.

I have been reading this title for a while, initially finding it just somewhat diverting, but with this issue I am really beginning to think that it is going somewhere. My sketchy plot outline above is probably not that helpful, but there is something very enjoyable about this odd meandering story that makes much of its referencing of previous fictional worlds. Maybe it has ramped up a level, or maybe something has finally clicked with me, but I am starting to think this is one of the most key titles coming out right now.

Unwritten Panda

*Although he is, obviously, an actually fictional character invented by Mike Carey and Peter Gross.

**Donostia is the Basque name for San Sebastian. I am curious as to whether Carey picked the name for the prison because he liked it, or if there is another Donostia on the French side of the border.

The Best Comic I Have Ever Been Paid To Endorse

The Unwritten #3, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This is the one about this fellow Tom Taylor whose father wrote children's fantasy books about Tommy Taylor, a highly fictionalised version of him (making him like Peter Llewellyn Davies or Alice Liddell or whatever Christopher Robin's real name was). His father has subsequently disappeared, but the son is still milking the connection (making him like Christopher Tolkien or Norbert Herbert). But now the protagonist has started to discover that maybe he is not really his father's son, while in an unlikely sequence of events various nutters have started thinking that he is actually the character in the books written by his father.

In this episode Mr Taylor finds himself in that villa in Switzerland where Mary Shelley had the idea for Frankenstein (and Milton apparently did work on Paradise Lost in a previous century). He had lived there with his father, before the latter went AWOL, and now some kind of conference for shitey horror writers is taking place. Taylor casts his mind back to the night his father disappeared, you know the score.

But, you ask, is this any good? Well, at this stage I say, yes, it is any good. There is an oddness to the story that is not showing any immediate sign of being resolved in an obvious manner. In narrative terms, though, I wonder if this title will find it difficult to keep going into the longer term. Sooner or later there will have to be some kind of big reveal about Tom Taylor's real past and his relationship with the various odd people – some of them plainly supernatural – who are floating around him. I am not sure the title will work if it endlessly delays that revelation, yet it will struggle to retain any narrative point once the character's background is known. Still, for the moment I am happy to hang on and see how this goes.

As an aside, one irritating thing about Vertigo titles is the way every one these days seems to feature some over the top endorsement (of the "best comic I've read in my puff" variety) from some other comics creator. This one has Ed Brubaker talking about how it "perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times", whatever that means. And The Unwritten itself contains a preview of some new Hellblazer graphic novel, written by well known writer of real books Ian Rankin. It is the best thing that some other "will endorse for food" types have seen in ages, and it seems also to capture the zeitgeist of our times by being about reality television. The art is engaging but I think I may well give this one a miss.

Swirling Pages Surround Man

The Unwritten #11, by Mike Carey, Peter Gross, & Jimmy Broxton

In an unlikely turn of events, Tom Taylor and his friends have travelled back in time to a strangely spectral version of the 1930s, where they find themselves up against the sinister Nazi Josef Goebbels. Although they manage to escape his clutches, Taylor next find themselves up against the story of Der Jud Süss - the story is in torment because of the way the Goebbels film studio has turned the original novel into a piece of anti-semitic propaganda. So, pretty run of the mill fare, I'm sure you will agree.

time panda

An inuit panda production

Little Girl, Naughty Rabbit

The Unwritten #12, by Mike Carey, Peter Gross, Kurt Huggins, Zelda Devon

I've started thinking that maybe the self-contained episodes of this are the best. This one takes a break from the main story about the… oh, whatever it's about, you know, all that stuff about meta-fiction and imaginary characters coming to life and all that. Instead with this one we basically get The Prisoner crossed with The House at Pooh Corner. Those were probably the very words used in the original pitch for this entertaining story of a naughty rabbit who tries to escape from Willowbank Wood so that he can go back to the real world and be a bad man once more.

An inuit panda production

Comics Roundup 21/5/2009

Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos #1 (of 1), by Jesse Alexander, John Paul Leon, & John E. Workman

This is a somewhat silly comic set in the Second World War, one of those stories where today's writers get to write old-school stories of start characters of yesteryear, in this case this is, you know, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. In this story these guys parachute into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and basically take on and defeat the entire German army (and a Nazi robot panzer storm trooper), capturing a Japanese submarine while they are at it. It is not quite as much fun as that makes it sound, and frankly this is a lot less entertaining than the Sgt. Rock story of a couple of years ago,but it does have nicely kinetic art, even if the artist seems to think that the Messershmidt Bf 110 has three engines.

The Unwritten #1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This is a new Vertigo ongoing title. The main character (one Tom Taylor) is this bloke whose father made a fictionalised version of him the lead character in a highly successful series of fantasy novels (kind of like if J.K. Rowling had a son called Harold, an especially apt analogy given how the fantasy novels here are clearly modelled on her books). Then the title starts suggesting that actually the main character is not actually the (vanished) author's son, but the actual fictional character somehow brought into the real world. Or maybe something else. By the end of it, Tom Taylor is somewhat bemused to find himself the centre of a new world religion, albeit one whose core membership is the kind of saddos who take fantasy novels that bit too seriously.

God only knows where they are going with this, but for the moment it seems like one to watch. Carey and Gross have form as the creators of the Lucifer title, one of those comics that I never read but always thought sounded like a good idea.

"The Unwritten" #5, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This is the title about the bloke who starts discovering that he might just be the fictional character with the same name who appears in his late father's books (kind of like if Alice Liddell were to discover that the Wonderland stories really happened, or something). This episode, though, is about Rudyard Kipling, with various writings also making an appearance. It is an odd story, suggesting that the great poet and storyteller of empire was being manipulated in what he wrote by a mysterious, shadowy, and very powerful conspiracy. And for what ends, precisely, remain unclear, though maybe this is one of those fictions mould reality type of things. Anyway, I liked this a lot, and I thought that basing a story on someone now so marginalised and misremembered as Kipling suggests real nerve on the part of the creators.

There is a preview at the back from some text novel based on Fables, the popular comic about various fairy-tale characters having moved to New York. It did not grab me.

Blowing horn, cradling hero; children reading hand-projecting book

The Unwritten #7 & #8, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This odd title continues. In some respects, this reminds me of Phonogram, in the sense that it takes everyday cultural things and sees a world of magic behind them. In this one, of course, it is the power of books and stories that the creators touch on. I am still a bit vague as to what is actually happening here – is the protagonist some kind of nexus for fictional things to intrude into reality? This question may not matter, and I suspect that the creators will try to delay the big reveal as long as possible.

image source